Gautam Ghosh's blog on how social media and technology and online communities are impacting organizations, people, careers and learning. Some focus on Social Recruiting, Social HR, Social Learning and Social Recognition.

Feb 3, 2004

"MBA programs attract the wrong people and teach them the wrong things. These are not the right people to hire to be your managers. If you want to develop your existing managers, don't send them to traditional MBA programs. Send them someplace that will draw on their experience and help them address the real issues they face."

On Consulting firms hiring MBAs he says:

The consultants are hiring all sorts of people: everyone from physicists, PhDs to lawyers. They put them through three-week programs in basic management to get grounding in the business disciplines. Consulting firms are finding they can hire people who are just as smart as, or smarter than, business school graduates and ones who are not on that mindless kick that ‘I'm going to succeed because I have an MBA.’

On what is wrong with MBAs

The people skills of MBAs are often very weak. This is because the kind of people an MBA program appeals to tend to be strong on analysis and weak on people. Secondly, MBA programs are notoriously poor at developing people skills. They may teach human resources, but even the term human resources is problematic. It was about the time we started using this term that we started firing people rather casually because you can fire resources. I'd rather your website was called HB.com – human beings.com.